Until the election, we’ll be mostly running quotes relating to politics — not on the concerns of the moment but the deeper matters, like (as here) the necessity of moral thinking and of putting oneself in another’s place.
Writing before and after World War I, the English academic G. D. H. Cole created “guild socialism” and later become one of the Labour party’s chief theoreticians and i944 the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. With his wife Margaret, he also wrote a series of mystery novels. This is taken from “What I Take for Granted,” written in 1947 and later published in Essays in Social Theory.
The essay offers twelve assumptions about what is good for society and people. This is his explanation of the twelfth and final one, “Right and Wrong Vision.”
I assume that everyone who acts against these principles is either a scoundrel, or blind. But, believing real scoundrels to be rare, I assume most of those who offend to be suffering from defective vision.
By vision I here mean imagination, especially power to put oneself in the places of others, and to think objectively, setting self-interest apart. No one can do these things wholly; but everyone can try to achieve them if he is given a chance. To give all men the best possible chance is one of the three great purposes of education. The other two are (a) to teach truth, (b) to teach citizenship.
This is . . . not a call to men to act after an impracticably high standard, but only to be always doing what they can to pull up the standards by which they and other men act. I am well aware of the dangers of “idealistic” behaviour that ignores realities: we are all so often reminded of these dangers nowadays that there is no risk of our forgetting them.
I wish rather to stress the danger of acting without any moral standards at all. The attempt to be realistically amoral is nonsensical. A man cannot be realistic in political or social matters except in relation to an end, and that end cannot be devoid of moral content. It may be a bad end, or a good one: it cannot be merely neutral.
The cant which suggests that one can set out to be “scientific” instead of being moral is based on sheer muddled thinking. One can set out to be scientific and moral, or scientific and immoral; but the realm of science is that of means, not of ends. Ends are essentially moral. The outlook for the world would not be any the less good, or bad, if it could be predicted scientifically.
Previous: Robert Coles on intellectuals as agents of conformity.